The Proposal

A year earlier, in the last warm week of September, Colin had asked her to run with him before dinner, and she had said yes without thinking about it, since they ran most weekends and the woods north of Northbridge were at their best in that light.

The shift took her as it always had, one long breath out and then the ground closer and louder and full of information, and she was moving. Colin's wolf was a shade darker than hers and a stride longer, and he let her set the pace out of habit, though he could have outrun her any day he chose. They went up through the trees and along the ridge path, where generations of the pack had worn the ground bare, and the air was cool enough now to taste.

She knew where they were going before he left the path, because there was only one thing out here worth leaving it for. The old mill stood where the creek came down off the ridge, two stories of stone with the roof half gone and the wheel long since rotted off its axle, though the water still ran through the channel beside it as if it had somewhere to be. She had found it in her second month in Northbridge and had been quietly in love with it since. Colin had listened to her talk about the stonework more than once.

He shifted back first, at the edge of the trees, and stood there in his jacket and jeans looking at the mill instead of at her. She shifted back beside him and started in on the roof, the way she always did here. The timbers were gone, but the walls were still sound. It would not take much to put one back on.

He did not say anything. That was unusual enough that she stopped.

"You're quiet."

"I'm listening."

"You're not. You've got your pack-meeting face on."

He laughed, and some of the nervousness went out of him, and he took her hand and walked her to the mill door, where three worn blocks of granite had been somebody's threshold once.

"Sit with me a minute."

"It's wet."

"It's granite. It's been wet for two hundred years." He sat, and she sat beside him, and he kept hold of her and watched the water for a while. It was the look he got ahead of hard conversations, the pack ones he mostly kept to himself. She waited.

"Is it the council?"

"No. Nothing's wrong. Nothing like that." He let out a breath. "Do you remember Iris's housewarming?"

She did not know why he was asking, but she did. June, her closest friend, had dragged her along as a plus-one two years ago. June had known Iris since she moved to Northbridge; Celia had only ever heard the name. The kitchen had been crowded, and Celia had been by the sink, half listening to a story June had told her before, when the back door opened and Colin Merrill came in with a bottle of wine in each hand. She had lived in the territory long enough by then to know his face, and the room went quiet in the particular way a room does when its Alpha walks in.

"I nearly dropped both of them," Colin said. "Because of you. I didn't even know your name, and I already knew you were mine."

She had thought it in almost the same words. The recognition had landed somewhere beneath thought, as if she had been expecting him. It was not a thing she had been able to explain to June on the drive home. It had never needed explaining to Colin.

"I knew that night, and I've known every day since. Two years of your drawings all over my kitchen table and you talking about this roof every time we come up here. I don't want a version of my life that doesn't have that in it." He turned her hand over in his.

It was only then that she understood what this was, and she found she could not say anything at all.

The ring, when he finally got it out of his jacket, was a plain band with a single stone, nothing that would catch on a drafting pen, and she could tell he had thought about that too.

"Celia. Will you marry me?"

"Yes," she said, before he had quite finished, and then, because he looked as though he might not have heard, "Colin. Yes."

He put the ring on her himself, fumbling it once before it slid home, and then she took his face in both hands and kissed him. She had kissed him a thousand times. It should not have felt any different. It did. Something that had been true between them for a long time had finally been said out loud, and saying it had made it more true. He pulled her in against him, and she stayed there, with her ring hand flat on his chest and his heart beating hard under it, and neither of them spoke, because nothing needed saying.

They stayed like that with the light going out of the trees and the creek talking to itself a little way off. Eventually he reached over and turned the ring slowly on her finger, as though checking that it was still there.

"You're going to call your mother."

"I'm going to call my mother."